MIT Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Myriam Heiman, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Neuroscience at MIT, has been selected as the next director of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. She succeeds Picower Professor Li-Huei Tsai, who is stepping down after leading the institute for 16 years.

“Myriam is an extraordinary scientist, a proven leader within MIT, and a deeply caring and generous mentor. Her research to determine why specific brain cell types are particularly vulnerable to diseases such as Huntington’s has produced studies that are both deep in their insight and sweeping in their scope,” says Nergis Mavalvala, dean of the MIT School of Science and the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics. “I firmly believe that Myriam will be an excellent leader during the Picower Institute’s next chapter.”

A molecular neurobiologist and geneticist, Heiman studies the neurodegenerative diseases of the brain’s basal ganglia, including Huntington’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. Using cutting-edge techniques, including single-cell genomics and a powerful transcriptomic technique she helped invent, called translating ribosome affinity purification, she aims to understand the molecular changes that eventually lead to cell death in these diseases.

The Picower Institute is a community of 16 neuroscience labs dedicated to understanding the mechanisms that drive learning and memory and related functions such as cognition, emotion, perception, behavior, and consciousness.

“I am honored to take on this role to support the institute’s exceptional scientists and trainees as they pursue discoveries that deepen our understanding of the brain and improve human health,” says Heiman, a professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

Picower Professor Susumu Tonegawa founded the institute as a center in 1994 before a transformative gift from Barbara and Jeffry Picower enabled it to become an institute in 2002. Li-Huei Tsai, who has served as director since 2009, announced in March that she would step down to focus on her research.

More: https://bcs.mit.edu/news/myriam-heiman-named-director-picower-institute-learning-and-memory

Using a new technique that can create vacancies at any site across a material and then shrink it to about 1/2,000 of its original volume, MIT researchers have designed devices that could be used for optical computing and other applications involving the manipulation of visible light.

The new fabrication technique, known as “implosion carving,” allows researchers to imprint features throughout a hydrogel using photopatterning. If patterned with a resolution of about 800 nanometers, these features can then be shrunk to less than 100 nanometers.

The researchers now plan to use the same principles to build optical devices that could classify cells based on their state as they flow through a microfluidic device. This could help identify rare cells such as circulating tumor cells in a blood sample, according to the researchers.

Gaojie Yang, a former MIT postdoc, is the co-lead author of the paper, which appeared in Nature Photonics. The paper’s senior authors are Peter So, director of the MIT Laser Biomedical Research Center (LBCR) and an MIT professor of biological engineering and mechanical engineering, and Edward Boyden, the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology at MIT and a professor of biological engineering, media arts and sciences, and brain and cognitive sciences. Boyden is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, the Yang Tan Collective, and Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

More: https://bcs.mit.edu/news/powerful-shrinking-technique-could-enable-devices-compute-light

Although many studies approach the developmental disorder Rett syndrome as a single condition arising from general loss of function in a gene that regulates brain development and function, a new study by MIT neuroscientists shows that two different mutations of the gene MECP2 caused many distinct abnormalities in lab cultures. The study also found that correcting key differences made by each mutation required different treatments.

“Individual mutations matter,” says Mriganka Sur, senior author of the new open-access study in Nature Communications and the Newton Professor in MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. “This is an approach to personalizing treatment, even for a single-gene disorder.”

The study employed advanced 3D human brain tissue cultures called “organoids” or “minibrains” derived from skin cells or blood cells donated by Rett syndrome patients with each mutation.

Read more: https://bcs.mit.edu/news/rett-syndrome-study-highlights-potential-personalized-treatments

Animal behavior reflects a complex interplay between an animal’s brain and its sensory surroundings. Only rarely have scientists been able to discern how actions emerge from this interaction. A new open-access study in Nature Neuroscience by researchers in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT offers one example by revealing how circuits of neurons within C. elegans nematode worms respond to odors and generate movement as they pursue of smells they like and evade ones they don’t.

“Across the animal kingdom, there are just so many remarkable behaviors,” says study senior author Steven Flavell, associate professor in the Picower Institute and MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. “With modern neuroscience tools, we are finally gaining the ability to map their mechanistic underpinnings.”

By the end of the study, which former graduate student Talya Kramer PhD ’25 led as her doctoral thesis research, the team was able to show exactly which neurons in the worm’s brain did which of the jobs needed to sense where smells were coming from, plan turns toward or away from them, shift to reverse (like old-fashioned radio-controlled cars, C. elegans worms turn in reverse), execute the turns, and then go back to moving forward. Not only did the study reveal the sequence and each neuron’s role in it, but it also demonstrated that worms are more skillful and intentional in these actions than perhaps they’ve received credit for. And finally, the study demonstrated that it’s all coordinated by the neuromodulatory chemical tyramine.

“One thing that really excited us about this study is that we were able to see what a sensorimotor arc looks like at the scale of a whole nervous system: all the bits and pieces, from responses to the sensory cue until the behavioral response is implemented,” Flavell says.

Read more: https://bcs.mit.edu/news/navigating-nematodes-scientists-map-out-how-brains-implement-behaviors

For students who are struggling with reading, using text-supplemented audiobooks can help dramatically, but only when paired with one-on-one instruction, according to a new study from MIT researchers.

Ola Ozernov-Palchik and Halie Olson, scientists in the lab of Grover M. Hermann Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences John Gabrieli, launched the audiobook study in 2020, when most schools in the United States had closed to slow the spread of Covid-19. The pandemic meant the researchers would not be able to ask families to visit an MIT lab to participate in the study — but it also underscored the urgency of understanding which educational technologies are effective, and for whom.

The study found that Children who were poor readers showed no improvement from audiobooks alone, but did make significant gains in vocabulary when the audiobooks were paired with one-on-one instruction. Even good readers learned more vocabulary when they received tutoring, although the differences for this group were less dramatic. The group’s findings were reported in the journal Developmental Science.

“It is an exciting moment in this ed-tech space,” says Gabrieli, who is an investigator at MIT’s McGovern Institute. “The admirable goal in all this is: Can we use technology to help kids progress, especially kids who are behind for one reason or another?”

Read more: https://bcs.mit.edu/news/learning-audiobooks

One of the symptoms of schizophrenia is difficulty incorporating new information about the world. This can lead people with schizophrenia to struggle with making decisions and, eventually, to lose touch with reality.

MIT neuroscientists have now identified a gene mutation that appears to give rise to this type of difficulty. In a study of mice, the researchers found that the mutated gene impairs the function of a brain circuit that is responsible for updating beliefs based on new input.

This mutation, in a gene called grin2a, was originally identified in a large-scale screen of patients with schizophrenia. The new study suggests that drugs targeting this brain circuit could help with some of the cognitive impairments seen in people with schizophrenia.

“If this circuit doesn’t work well, you cannot quickly integrate information,” says Guoping Feng, the James W. and Patricia T. Poitras Professor in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, a member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, and the associate director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT. “We are quite confident this circuit is one of the mechanisms that contributes to the cognitive impairment that is a major part of the pathology of schizophrenia.”

Feng is a senior author of the new study, which appeared in the journal "Nature Neuroscience." Tingting Zhou, a research scientist at the McGovern Institute, and Yi-Yun Ho, a former MIT postdoc, are the lead authors of the paper.

More: https://bcs.mit.edu/news/brain-circuit-needed-incorporate-new-information-may-be-linked-schizophrenia